Author: Tim Jarrett

News is free…

Well, as a Radio user I have no more gripes about dearths of news feeds, having just found NewsIsFree. The only question remaining is, why don’t the newspapers go out and build their own RSS feeds to share–why do sites like NewsIsFree and Moreover have to do it for them? Seems to me they could disintermediate these guys in a heartbeat. And I would think that newspapers, above all, would understand the importance of syndication.
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Shadow government

The New York Times: 60 Feet Under. Maureen Dowd makes some good points here and gets some great zingers:

“Mr. Cheney is Lord of the Rings, ruling over his very own Moria, an underground kingdom of bureaucratic hobbits and orcs….

Without Democrats or journalists, the underground executive branch can operate the way the real executive branch would like to, and frequently does — without a lot of second-guessing, Freedom of Information Act requests, complaints from civil libertarians and attention to the rights of Marin County hot-tubbers.

Nothing will be transcribed. So there will be no reason to clean up the language in President Bush’s transcripts, as the White House has done routinely since 9/11.”

Interesting question. We’ve always assumed that we get full access to the running of our government, with the exception of stuff that we really don’t want to know about (national security). There’s the rub–this administration thinks everything it does is “national security.” And it doesn’t want to share anything with the people’s representatives in the Congress, either.

Maybe Tom Daschle should talk to Bill Clinton, who came back from being made almost irrelevant by Newt Gingrich. He might have some advice on how to restore checks and balances on a political power hellbent on eliminating them.
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Hooked on Radio

So I have to confess. I’m not using it for weblogging, but I’m finding Radio to be invaluable in feeding my news addiction. I love getting my favorite blogs plus headlines from CNET, Wired, Slashdot, and others all on one page. There are some really cool people out there building RSS feeds.

My question is, why don’t the major news sources (WSJ, NYT (yes I know there’s a scraped feed available), Washington Post) hop on the bandwagon? It would be fairly trivial, and I would think good business, to set up an XML headline link listing that would bring people to your site.
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Good morning!

It’s a beautiful gray day in Boston this morning. I’m feeling on top of the world for no apparent reason.

Lisa is out of town, having taken her mom to London for a shopping trip. (!) I spoke with her yesterday briefly just before my cell phone ran out of battery. They got upgraded to Business Elite class on their flight to London on Thursday. I didn’t hear many details; apparently Business Elite is a mythical place with champagne, good food, and cheese plates. If the rest of their trip is a tenth as good she’ll be on cloud 9 when she gets home.

Nofont is good fonts

Oh man. In the days before blogging, when I used to get sensually excited about the serifs and descenders of well designed fonts, I never dreamed about a site as cool as nofont. Check out the typography experiments, the downloadable experimental fonts, the page design….
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Digitizing Chaucer

The Guardian: British Library digitises Chaucer for the internet. Aside from the lowercase i, what’s interesting about this story is that they’re not talking about making the text available (it’s already pretty widely available), but high resolution images, as they helped to do with the Gutenberg Bible project.

There are two interesting things about this project:

  1. Typography freaks like myself will get to see in glorious hi-res the work of William Caxton, who was one of the earliest printers in England.
  2. The existing books are pretty fragile and this will make sure that people have an alternative to viewing them in person, which exposes them to additional damage.

I used to work at the Electronic Text Center when I was an undergrad at Virginia. I was reading Beowulf in Old English at the time, and was blown away when I saw the British Library’s first digitizations of the Beowulf manuscript. I could look at the passages that were debated by scholars and understand why they were debated (generally, the manuscript was falling apart in places).
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Morpheus: Classic story of tech strategy gone wrong

Among file sharing programs, one strange menage a trois stands out: Morpheus, KaZaA, Grokster. All three run essentially the same software, owned by KaZaA. Last week something happened to Morpheus — it’s not clear what. According to Slashdot, the ownership of Morpheus (Music City) has claimed that individuals “launched a DOS attack and tampered with the morpheus network in order to disallow logons to the FastTrack P2P filesharing network through the client. ” According to this message, KaZaA sold out to another outfit and started kicking the Morpheus clients off the network.

Where’s the cautionary tale here? Well, there are two parameters that determine how well you can capture the value you create (i.e., stay in business). Is your product’s uniqueness easy or hard to maintain? Do you hold the complementary assets you need to realize that product’s value tightly or loosely? Well, let’s see. Morpheus licensed its technology wholesale, so uniqueness was hard to maintain. And their network was connected to its competitors (all three P2P clients connected to the same big FastTrack network). I guess they didn’t have too tight a control over their complementary assets. So how was Morpheus going to capture any value??? Somewhere, though, someone thought they were a good idea…
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Yeah, I’m updating my design too

So everyone seems to be junking their tables these days and going to CSS-based layouts. I’m working on it … right now I’m getting close on the basic CSS layout and am going looking for pictures. Maybe I’ll launch the new look soon… we’ll see.

Disney bashes Apple; Intel to its defense???

Disney is acting hostile to consumers on behalf of the motion picture industry, and apparently made some snarky remarks about “rip, mix, burn.” Then Leslie L. Vadasz, Executive VP, Intel, steps up to the defense:

Another major point of misunderstanding is our differing perspectives on the role of the PC in the hands of the consumer. Mr. Eisner’s characterization of the phrase “rip, mix, burn” as emblematic of our industry’s perspective on piracy is utterly false. What the content community fails to recognize is that these utilities – the ability to copy content, remix and manage it and port it to other storage media for personal use in a protected fashion – are features that consumers have come to expect. The ability to rip, mix and burn in a protected manner is not piracy, it is simply fair use of content as permitted by law.

The music (and movie) industries need to hear this. If you’re at war with your customers, at war with their rights under the law, then of course CD sales will fall. If you persist in implementing ham handed and insulting copyright protection on your media that render it unplayable and remove features that consumers like, you’ll render yourselves irrelevant and illiquid in less time than it takes you to cut loose quality acts like Wilco, Tori Amos, or Cowboy Junkies–or for one of your innumerable teen pop bands to peak, fade, or be forgotten.
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Male grief? Male feelings

Dave has kindly reminded me that grief is part of a bigger issue, male feelings in general. His Davenet on the subject from 1998 suggests that manhood = controlling emotions in our culture. He suggests that if the culture were more open to receiving male expressions of emotion, that men would be better at expressing their feelings.

I don’t know that I necessarily agree with the first point (though I’m not sure how I would define manhood otherwise), but I definitely believe the second. It’s a reinforcing loop. As men stay silent, the culture becomes accustomed to men not expressing their feelings. Eventually, expressing feelings becomes an exception, exceptions aren’t tolerated, and the cost of not expressing feelings becomes over time too high to bear.

How do we break the loop? Men have to stop being afraid of the cost. Everyone needs to stop treating expressions of male emotion like they’re antisocial behavior.
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Why can’t men grieve?

This link will probably break, but if it does it’s worth going to inkiboo.com and finding the post yourself. There are so few male role models to show us how to deal with grief. This blog entry, about the death of the author’s mother, is one.

I wish I had seen this a long time ago. I don’t think I could have managed to be nearly as adult or effective as the writer. But I might have had an easier time dealing with the death of my grandmother last year. I was totally unprepared and I didn’t allow myself to grieve. Because I never acknowledged how I felt, I just felt bad all the time. I ended up putting myself into a deep depression that it took me months to come out of–I’m still not sure I’m out of it. Why can’t men grieve? Or maybe just why couldn’t I?
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I prefer my Mac clothed, thank you

More proof that we Mac users are a weird bunch: Undress your Mac for thrills. I’ve never taken pictures, but I confess that when I got my PowerBook G3 a year and a half ago I set up a big work area, reverently unpacked each of the pieces, and, salivating, turned on the machine to hear the chime. I’ve never ever said anything like this, however: “I’m pretty sure it’s as close to sex as you can get with a machine. I mean, look at this photo.”
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